The Best Horror Movie of 2010: I Saw the Devil
This post is part of Paste’s Century of Terror project, a countdown of the 100 best horror films of the last 100 years, culminating on Halloween. You can see the full list in the master document, which will collect each year’s individual film entry as it is posted.
The Year
This is an interesting year, with a few entries near the top that are most comfortable in the realm of prestige drama or psychological thriller, and yet both the likes of Black Swan and Shutter Island also hang on the periphery of horror. Unlike some of the other cases in which I’ve argued that of course ____ or ____ movie obviously deserves the “horror” title, this strikes me as a year of more genuinely subjective choices. On some level, whether one deems each of these films horror is likely dependent upon the subjective interpretation of each.
Black Swan, one can certainly argue, has a certain strain of almost Cronenbergian body/identity horror running through it, seemingly drawing on some of the same loss of the self present in our 1997 selection, Perfect Blue. As experienced by poor Mima in that film, Natalie Portman’s Nina is a woman made to bend over backward to suit the needs of others in her life, until the point that her very essence seems to be eroding away, and she sees herself as stalked by another, better, more vivacious version of herself. At the same time, the film remains more easily accessible than Aronofsky’s biblically minded projects that followed it, Noah and mother!, existing on one side of a stylistic gulf but hinting at its director’s willingness to cross over that gulf in the near future.
Requiring far less thought, but bringing tremendous appeal to the table this year is Eli Craig’s Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, which hilariously turned Deliverance-esque tropes on their head by portraying the titular Tucker and Dale as kind-hearted but dim-witted protagonists who are misunderstood and unfairly maligned by a group of snooty college kids who believe the “good old boys” to be homicidal killers. And as the misunderstandings and rural prejudices pile up, so do the bodies, in a series of incredibly unlikely and spectacularly bloody mistakes. As strong as the concept and screenplay are, the film could easily have faltered without its two outstanding performances by Tyler Labine and especially Alan Tudyk, whose exasperation at a seemingly suicidal gang of college kids “killing themselves all over my property” make the pair an instantly iconic horror duo. Take it from me: There are still a lot of Tucker & Dale fans out there waiting for Craig’s long-delayed follow-up.
This is also a strong year for world-building in indie horror, as evidenced by Jim Mickle’s low-budget but wonderfully evocative Stake Land, which imagines an apocalyptic U.S. landscape where barricaded towns trade vampire fangs for goods and services, and Trollhunter, a faux documentary about a man dedicated to exterminating the giant (but surprisingly stealthy) trolls who live among us. Other notables include the American remake of Let the Right One In, which we previously noted is a far more faithful and compelling adaptation than anyone could reasonably have expected, and the big-budget, but sadly dispassionate remake of The Wolfman, which presaged many of the difficulties Universal would have at the end of the decade in re-launching their movie monster “Dark Universe.”
2010 Honorable Mentions: Black Swan, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Shutter Island, Let Me In, Trollhunter, Stake Land, Insidious, The Crazies, We Are What We Are, Wake Wood, Monsters, The Wolfman
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